“Miss Lloyd,” he says blandly, “do you not think it is time to drop this masking?”
Elinor looks at him with wondering and offended eyes. They are not the eyes of either the picture, or the soft brown ones he has known hitherto as hers. They flash up to
him in angry brilliancy as she replies:
“I do not understand you, sir!” So sure is he, and so amazed at this stubbornness, that he almost as indignantly replies:
“And I am sure I cannot understand you!”
“I do not desire that you should,” she retorts: “but I think it due to myself to demand why you presume to thus address me, Mr. Schuyler.”
The offended tone remains, but blended with it is a little faint touch of grieved feeling, which his nice ear detects.
“Can you pretend to still treat me as if you did not recognize me? Is my picture so unlike me that you do not know the original?”
“Your picture!” and such a world of wonderment is expressed in her voice that he thinks she ought to be on the stage for consummate acting.
“Perhaps you do not recognize this,” and he holds before her a picture so like herself that she is confounded. For the moment, she really does not see her cousin Lizzie as plainly as herself. The photograph, like one of those libellous stories which are true in detail, but false in implication, has given the reddish tint in Lizzie’s hair, brows, and lashes dark as her own, and there is the blonde cousin presented, the very counterpart of the brunette, one. The light hazel eyes are in the photograph, dark as Elinor’s own.